Denver Broncos / NFL

Broncos rookie center Walton to face an old foe

Rookie center J.D. Walton has held his own against some of the elite collegiate defensive linemen in the country.
(John Leyba, The Denver Post
)

For a guy who spends his workday right smack in the middle of things, J.D. Walton said he wanted to sit this one out. That the past is past and the future is, well, tonight.

"No, I'm not really going to answer anything like that," the Broncos' rookie center said. "I'm not going to give him any potential bulletin board stuff or say something I shouldn't or anything like that. I'm just starting out in this. I'm sorry."

"Him" would be Detroit Lions rookie defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh. Walton, 6-feet-3, 305 pounds, often will be lined up across from Suh in the Broncos' first home preseason game tonight at Invesco Field at Mile High.

They have done this all before, when Walton was at Baylor and Suh was at Nebraska. It was those collegiate matchups that pushed Walton up several draft boards across the league, including the Broncos', who drafted him in the third round (Suh went No. 2 overall).

"I look at it like you've got to raise your game up for whoever you go against," Walton said. "I consider every game, every play a chance to prove myself, make myself better."

Suh is coming off one of the most dominant seasons in college football history. He had 24 tackles for a loss and 12 sacks last fall, incredible totals for an interior defensive lineman who was routinely double- and triple-teamed.

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Walton started all 36 of his games at Baylor — he sat out a season after transferring from Arizona State — and scouts consistently graded him high for his instincts and his ability to finish blocks with a little nastiness. During face-to-face interviews at the scouting combine in February, several teams said he showed a good awareness about the parts of his game that needed improvement.

"I know I have a lot of things to work on," Walton said. "That's just how it is. You can't go in thinking you're done or there's nothing left to do. There's always something more to do."

He's done well enough to be running first string since early in camp.

A player such as Suh gives teams a chance to gauge their offensive linemen. Lions defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham likes to joke that he has coached "for 1,000 years," and he said earlier this year that in all of those years, he's never given a higher predraft grade to a defensive lineman than he gave Suh.

So a player who held his own against Suh from time to time earned more than a little predraft love from the league's personnel people.

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"He hung in there against Suh," Broncos coach Josh McDaniels said. "He hung in there against (Oklahoma defensive tackle Gerald) McCoy. He hung in there the other night against Cincinnati too. We liked a lot of the things we saw from J.D."

So much so that Walton opened training camp as the team's starting center. McDaniels said the job was open for competition, but Walton has remained with the regulars from Day One.

That's a proposition Walton said he didn't really give much thought to after the draft.

"I came in thinking I'm going to get the best out of myself in every rep I have, and that was really it," Walton said. "My thinking was I've just got to bust my butt and earn the respect of the older guys. Starting will take care of itself if you do the things you're supposed to out on the practice field. If you don't, you've got bigger problems than if you're starting or not.

"Nothing is official until it happens. You hope, it's an idea, maybe, but until somebody calls you, you're not drafted in this league, and until somebody tells you, you're not starting. That's kind of how I look at those things."

In three years as a starter at Baylor, Broncos rookie center J.D. Walton faced Nebraska's Ndamukong Suh twice. Walton fared well, which helped his stock with NFL scouts. The two will face each other again tonight. A look at how Suh did against Walton in college.

Year Tackles TFL Sacks
2009 5 3 1
2008 7 1 0
2007 Did not play Nebraska
2006 Walton sat out as a transfer from Arizona St.

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